Tag Archives: Technology

Announcements, External Funding

NSF Partnerships for Innovation: Building Innovation Capacity (NSF PFI: BIC)

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The Partnerships for Innovation: Building Innovation Capacity (PFI: BIC) program supports university-industry partnerships which are led by an interdisciplinary academic research team collaborating with a least one industry partner. In this program, there is a heavy emphasis on the quality, composition, and participation of the partners, including the appropriate contributions for each role. These partnerships focus on the integration of technologies into a specified human-centered service system with the potential to achieve transformational change, satisfying a real need by making an existing service system smart(er) or by spurring the creation of an entirely new smart service system.

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Announcements, External Funding
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Department of Energy, Office of Energy Efficiency & Renewable Energy Funding Opportunities $50 Million in Funding Potential for Solar Energy Technology Research and Innovation

To accomplish the goals of the SunShot Initiative, the U.S. Department of Energy Solar Energy Technologies Office supports funding opportunities on photovoltaics, concentrating solar power, systems integration, technology to market, and soft costs projects. Following an open, competitive solicitation process, these funding opportunities encourage collaborative partnerships among industry, universities, national laboratories, federal, state, and local governments and non-government agencies and advocacy groups. Solicitations may include financial or technical assistance.

Broadly, these Energy Department investments support state-of-the-art products, solutions, and technology advancements that will increase solar energy system performance and efficiency and drive down costs. The Energy Department’s SunShot Initiative is a collaborative national effort that aggressively drives innovation to make solar energy fully cost-competitive with traditional energy sources by the end of the decade.

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Commentary

David Bates at the Humanities Center PostHUMANities series

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The second lecture in the PostHUMANities series organized by Lehigh’s Humanities Center, was given by Prof. David Bates, chair of the Rhetoric Department at Berkeley University. His lecture, part of a project provisionally titled Human Insight: An Artificial History of Natural Intelligence, examined the history of artificial intelligence and cybernetics.

In a talk that spoke to historians of science and technology, media theorists, cognitive scientists, and anyone interested in the relationship between cognition and technology in a digital world, Prof. Bates argued that philosophical and scientific discourses of the mind and of technology both depend on analogies between cognitive processes and computational systems. Professor Bates highlighted the ways in which the brain has been seen to function like a machine and, inversely, machines have been understood to operate much like minds—from the early modern period to today. Continue reading David Bates at the Humanities Center PostHUMANities series →